Posted
by
Cliff
on Saturday March 25, 2006 @07:20PM
from the better-to-find-out-now-rather-than-later dept.

Moochfish asks: "Recently, my company took a brief look at AJAX to see if it was worth implementing on a few of our administrative pages to speed up certain tasks. I had created a demo that made an interesting use of live edit fields that showed some promise. However, after a little debate on the issue, we ultimately decided to skip AJAX implementations anywhere in our codebase due to concerns about things breaking when IE7 comes out. I haven't personally tried IE7, but I completely understand and mirror the concern. For you testers of IE7, does it successfully render current, non-ASP AJAX enabled sites without errors? And finally, does IE7 introduce any new functionality that may enhance the current capabilities of AJAX?"

"Many of the AJAX libraries out there have tons of duplicate functionality to handle cross-browser support. Recalling Microsoft's history of IE quirks, it seems likely that the new IE7 will have its own set of problems with regards to JS implementation. With the AJAX craze only growing, how are other developers and IT departments addressing this problem? Is this even a valid concern? While this is probably not an issue with ASP developers - especially with the release of Atlas - is this an issue for sites that use non-MS technologies?"

This is true. The only cross browser testing that should need doing is whether the browser is IE 6 or 5.5 (or 5?) in which case use the active X control. IE7 has the same XMLHTTPRequest object as all the other proper browsers

Yep, other than that I haven't seen any modification of the Javascript interpreter mentioned anywhere.

Internet Explorer doesn't have a JavaScript interpreter. It has a JScript interpreter. JavaScript and JScript are both implementations and supersets of the ECMAScript language specified in the ECMA-262 standard.

My company is involved in consumer web traffic and thus many users in the company use a variety of browsers to test both in-house and partner web pages. The rest of our administrative software works fine in the main browsers we use and it would be rediculous to force everybody to start using a specific browser for one or two pages.

Secondly, my prototype was a demo for something I wanted to expand to our clients and partners. And trust me, coding a 20 line AJAX script is not that much work and you might think.

Finally, telling people to "fuck off until support is added" is the exact reason the project was canned. That is not possible in the business world.

The decision was made without my direct input. I though it was an interesting issue and was curious how other departments handled it. I wasn't asking for ways to convince my management to reverse their decision.